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Accessing articles and books?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, Tom writes:

I frequently come across academic articles/books that, for whatever reason, I do not have access to through my institution, even if the article/book is published with a well-known press. Aside from buying it, what [to] do?

Another reader submitted the following reply:

[A]re you a member of the Facebook group The Philosophical Underclass? That's a great resource for articles.

ResearchGate is another good resource where you can submit requests directly to authors for private copies of their articles. As for books, I don't know. My usual solution is to either purchase an ebook version (which are usually cheaper than print versions), or if that is still more expensive than I'd like, to rent the ebook for some short period of time (which in my experience is usually pretty cheap). But unfortunately, I suspect that far too many books hardly get read because of just how expensive and hard to access they are. I don't have any good solutions, and obviously illegal means of obtaining books and articles are illegal. Are they are any good book-sharing systems? I do know some institutions have inter-library loan systems where they share books with each other, but I don't know how common or useful this is for obtaining the kinds of books the OP has in mind.

Anyway, these are my thoughts. What are yours?

Posted in

17 responses to “Accessing articles and books?”

  1. cecil burrow

    and obviously illegal means of obtaining books and articles are illegal.
    I can’t imagine what it would be like to think that Elsevier or OUP really deserves the $80-100+ that they are asking for that book, and that downloading it from libgen is ethically objectionable.

    Reply
  2. Colin McCaffrey

    I would suggest looking into Inter Library Loan services at your institution. In fact, most academic and many public libraries do have services for borrowing a print copy of a book or receiving a scan of an article or chapter from other institutions. There is a very robust infrastructure for this that fulfills millions of requests annually. Timeliness can vary, but often the service is free. You could also request that your library purchase a copy of the book in question, either in print or online, Even smaller libraries usually reserve a portion of their collection budget for this sort of request. (Also if you do run into a pay-walled article on a publishers web-site you should make sure it isn’t available through an aggregator or database your library does provide.

    Reply
  3. Michel

    I unabashedly use the book-finding website and the DOI-finding website (which doesn’t usually work for OUP, incidentally), both of which shall remain anonymous so as not to violate any commenting policies here. I also use the Underclass, although most people don’t have access to work under the aegis of the PDC. And I directly email authors to ask for drafts. Sometimes I pester my friends and acquaintances, if I know they’ve cited something in their own work. And, of course, I check the PhilArchive, just in case, and also an author’s academia.edu page. Brute googling sometimes works, too. And sometimes a google books preview suffices.
    I would note, however, that sharing articles via the Underclass is also a violation of copyright.

    Reply
  4. PhilyOsopher

    Is The Philosophical Underclass more legal than libgen et al?

    Reply
  5. FC

    I have had good luck simply emailing authors to request articles I can’t otherwise get. I’ve also found a few articles on their author/school websites.
    For books and some articles, I use interlibrary loan. My school’s library is connected with others in our university system, so I can usually find what I need.
    FWIW, a research librarian here told me that, for many journals, they’d rather pay for the occasional article than purchase a subscription. Anyway, no harm in asking.

    Reply
  6. angry author

    I imagine everyone who is stealing books from Oxford, etc. are conscientious about giving the authors of the books $5 when they bump into them at conferences.

    Reply
  7. Guy

    Internet archive (archive.org) has a lot of books that one can borrow (get e-access to) for an hour or so. I’ve been surprised at some of the things I’ve found there that I needed.
    I also second all the suggestions about emailing authors. I’ve found academics overall to be very receptive to sharing PDFs of their work upon request.

    Reply
  8. cb

    use interlibrary loan! it is legal, and for most academics the difference between getting an article today & getting an article two or three days from now is marginal (and very often they can source it the same day, especially when the journal is recent + can simply be downloaded rather than being scanned). but above all, interlibrary loan use is a strong indicator to librarians of what resources your institution ought to pay for–frequently requested journals will be the first ones to get new subscriptions for libraries that have ditched their big deals to go à la carte, and very often libraries will buy books if you’ve had to ill them multiple times. if you get your articles via facebook groups & sci-hub, librarians have no way of knowing that you want these resources at your institution. sometimes even when i do use sci-hub/libgen as a stopgap, i request the resource on ill anyway, simply so my institutional librarian has an accurate sense of resource demand. if nobody uses library resources, library collections budgets will continue getting cut!

    Reply
  9. cb

    the other thing i want to add, apropos of marcus’ question, is that every academic and public library has interlibrary loan. i mean every–i’ve never encountered an exception, across dozens of institutions. it is always budgeted for, because it is always a need. a very small number of libraries will make you pay for the rare interlibrary request for which the lending library charges a fee, but most lending libraries do not charge a fee, and even so, most borrowing libraries will cover this fee anyway. my not-very-well-to-do library will cover these up to $25 per request; i know of libraries that cover $75 per request with regularity. and there are good odds that your library is in some variety of consortium that has guaranteed free lending + courier-based next-day book delivery. and just to reiterate, do not feel guilty about it–library spending is under 1% at the average academic institution, and collections spending hovers around a third of that percent, so if you don’t spend it, it’ll keep getting cut.

    Reply
  10. underclass

    Re @PhilyOsopher’s question “Is The Philosophical Underclass more legal than libgen et al?” Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but if you share an article or chapter with someone in The Philosophical Underclass that is probably going to fall under “fair use” because you’re sharing the article with one person (or maybe a handful of people) for an educational/scholarly purpose. In contrast Libgen is illegal because it contains full books that are being shared publicly/widely/systematically.
    (Also I’d like to second @cb’s lovely point that we should make ILL requests so we can send the right signals to our libraries!)

    Reply
  11. PhilyOsopher

    @Underclass. I appreciate you pointing out the differences. But as far as I can see they are differences that make no moral difference. Also a couple of the differences you point out seem spurious. For one, Libgen contains articles too–thats why I go there. Second, I also find it odd that you seem to think libgen isn’t also being used “for an educational/scholarly purpose.”

    Reply
  12. Michel

    Yeah. Authors sharing pre-print copies is one thing. Third parties sharing the final publication is another, and the difference between the Underclass and the other sites is really just one of scale. There’s no question that Underclass requests don’t comply with the letter of the law.
    Neither, for that matter, does uploading an article to your LMS for your students. As I understand it, you’re supposed to either link to it via the library, or compile a coursepack. Doing so is, of course, better, since it helps the library to keep track of usage. But it’s a right pain.

    Reply
  13. Mickey Mouse

    Just email the author. People are often happy to send you their paper. If they don’t answer – don’t cite them.

    Reply
  14. anonymous associate professor and author

    I second the suggestion to email the author, if interlibrary loan cannot access the title (sometimes this happens). I’d be glad to share the pdf page-proofs of my books with any individual who asked me; but I don’t post them online since I am fairly sure doing so would violate my contractual agreement with the press.

    Reply
  15. SD

    As far as articles go both contacting the author and ILL are good. Even at schools that are very much not research focused like mine you can get about anything you want article-wise through ILL. But if it’s an article that actually looks interesting, and not one I need to read for due diligence, I’ll usually contact the author first. For what it’s worth I’ve usually found Philosophical Underclass pretty unpleasant and don’t use it any more. There are a few people there who have taken it on themselves to police requests and revel in trying to publicly shame people they judge not to have earned help getting articles. I had one guy literally post a screen shot of a link to the article I was looking for on libgen and not bother to send it to me. (The thing is he couldn’t have since the link didn’t actually work.) The pettiness there is just mind boggling.
    ILL isn’t a good solution for books I don’t think. For one thing, the lending periods can be extremely short, so it’s hard to get the book read in the window you have. Also, if you need to find a quote or double check a claim it takes a very long time to get it back. Finally, like a lot of people I like to write in the margins of books. Obviously you can’t, or at least shouldn’t, do that with any library book. I will sometimes buy even outrageously expensive books, but I’ve increasingly gotten to the point where I’ll just download them from libgen or a similar site. And I don’t feel the least bit guilty about this. The prices that publishers charge are truly exploitative and it’s not clear to me what publishers do that actually creates or even adds value. The editorial practices and processes of even the most elite publishers have really went downhill. I sometimes suspect they don’t even hire proofreaders. I recently literally threw a book on a formal topic from Cambridge in the trash because so many of the sections that used formal methods had mistakes that it was practically unreadable. And in a logic book I was considering using for a a class from another elite publisher I saw “otbain” on page four or five which didn’t exactly inspire confidence on what was to follow.
    And to answer angry author’s gripe. Well the people who publish with the likes of Oxford usually have quite a bit more money than do the people who pirate those books, many of whom probably lack the money to even attend said conferences. Moreover, as far as I can tell the main advantage of publishing an academic book with a publisher like that is the bump it gives ones prestige. Practically no academic makes a living off of the royalties of say books on Hegel or Thomas Reid. Nor is it even a main source of income for most academics. However, even if authors did make a lot of money from academic books I’d still not feel guilty for pirating because to be honest I think that by publishing with a press that charges exorbitant prices for monologues and collections one is playing a role in exploiting more vulnerable people in the profession. It matters very much here that these publisher’s prices often hover around $100 per book and that we need to read them for our research or even teaching. I’d never pirate a non-academic book by an author I like like Kelly Link. But Link’s new book is $27 in hardcover and no one, or at least practically no one, needs to read it for their job. Anyway, I can see why junior people publish with these presses since getting the right name slapped on a book makes sure people will read it and the prestige of publishing with them helps to make a name for oneself in and of itself. But when it comes to established people, whose books will get read and assigned no matter what, it’s unjustifiable that they all don’t do what J. David Velleman and Peter Smith have done and post PDFs of their books for free and paper copies for very reasonable prices.

    Reply
  16. Underclass

    @PhilyOsopher, I might agree with you that the differences between the underclass and libgen are not moral differences–I was only trying to explain what I take to be the legal difference.
    I certainly agree that the sharing that goes on through Libgen is often for an educational/scholarly purpose. (I didn’t meant to imply otherwise but I can see how I wasn’t clear.) I mentioned the “educational/scholarly purpose” because that is one part of what makes the sharing of a copyrighted work considered (legally) “fair use”, at least as far as I understand it. My understanding is sharing on the underclass might be fair use because of the scholarly purpose plus the fact that the sharing is done on a small scale. But you can share things for a scholarly purpose and it not count as fair use because you’re sharing too large of an amount of the work (e.g., whole book instead of chapter) or you’re sharing it in a widespread way (e.g., posting a chapter publicly on the web instead of emailing it to a colleague). (see for better explanation: https://guides.nyu.edu/fairuse)

    Reply
  17. An academic

    You can also email authors and ask them for a copy of their book! I have pdf final proofs of every book I’ve published, and have been known to share them with others who lack access/funds….

    Reply

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